If you haven’t seen these movies, I highly recommend them (but make sure you have a steady stomach before tackling “The Hunger Games” which spends the first 30 minutes trying like hell to relieve your stomach of what you just ate (shaky cam, like Windows 8 needs to DIE!).

A few predictions come or coming true from each:

Demolition Man
First off, this is a highly cheezy movie, and is far from Stallone’s best effort. It does, however, feature a young (and hot) Sandra Bullock (whom I was in love with at the time) which is why I watched it in the first place back in the 90′s.Things from this movie coming true:

The rise of anti-personal freedom nazis. Anyone who thought this scene would never happen hasn’t been to New York City lately and met Nanny “20 oz Coke” banning Bloomberg. New York, like everywhere else, has an unelected and unaccountable “health board” that apparently has the authority to forbid personal choice and to make the sale and consumption of legal products a crime. And it’s not just degenerate urban hives like NYC, closer to home, the Cabell County WV “health board” banned (and criminalized) all smoking in restaurants, regardless of the desire of the property owner and customer. No matter where you live there is probably a board of people whom you can’t fire nor vote out of office who is paid (by you) to take personal freedoms away. Let this continue another few decades and we very well may see the extreme lack of personal freedom in this movie come to pass.

Minority Report
This was Tom Cruise from before he went batshit crazy, when he was still an A-List action/sci-fi actor. A great (and scary) movie that is destined to be a sci-fi classic, depicting a future in which thought crime is crime, where being angry enough to commit murder is equal to murder. Things from this movie coming true:

Thoughtcrime. These days they call them “hate crimes”, in which the law attempts to read the mind of the criminal and assign extra blame for committing acts that are already crimes anyway, but for some reason deserve extra weight because they are against an “insert protected sexual orientation or skin pigmentation here”. ALL CRIMES ARE HATE CRIMES! Anyone sick enough to steal things they don’t own from others, or to assault, or to rape, or to murder ARE ALL HATERS. They HATE CIVILIZATION. They reject the fact that there are rules that apply to them.

No privacy. Frankly I thought this was the scariest part. Trying to evade government thugs for a crime you hadn’t committed while having every evil marketer knowing (and throwing up in your face) every intimate detail of your life. Think pop up ads are bad now? Wait until they are in 3-D and in every public space. Not to mention those thousands of government drones that will soon fill our skies watching our every move.

The Hunger Games
This is a movie I stopped watching 15 minutes in because the shaky cam was making me motion sick, before research on the Internet revealed that the camera steadies about 15-20 minutes later, and I’m glad I stuck with it. It’s a shame that they tried to make that part nearly impossible to pay attention to, because those 30 minutes were probably the most important part of this movie. Things from this movie coming true:

The oppression of people who produce things, such as coal. Katniss comes from coal country. Indeed, the description of her district sounds a LOT like Kentucky or West Virginia (Jennifer Lawrence is from Kentucky, btw). This part of the country has taken it in the pants harder from Obama and his regulatory fascism than probably any other. To me it is not at ALL inconceivable that regions of America like this one may well REBEL in the way described in the movie, to be forcibly put down. It also depicts a government ruling class post-welfare that feeds itself, not the people who presumably, at some point in the past, gave them power.

The rise of violent, gladiatorial sports. Such as MMA, which has replaced boxing as the most popular fighting sport. The further society falls from civility, the more violent the entertainment must be to distract the masses. In a post-Republic future, I could foresee a dictatorial leftist regime resorting to bloodsports involving children (as depicted in the movie) as a means of placating the masses. See also “The Running Man”.

In conclusion, I think these three sci-fi visions of the future are more likely to come to pass in some combination than the highly optimistic one Gene Roddenberry depicted in Star Trek.